A Comparison of the League of Nations and the United Nations
Inis L. Claude stated that "'One World' is in some respects an ideal and an aspiration, born of modern interpretations of ancient moral thoughts and of rational estimates of the requirements for human survival." Both the League of Nations and its successor, the United Nations, were created as international organizations with a vested interest in maintaining the peace, preventing war, creating a mechanism or set of mechanisms for international cooperation and diplomacy, and otherwise serving as trustees of the international social order. Though the circumstances and the driving forces leading to the establishing of first the League and later the UN were different, they were similar to the extent that there was a perception of a real need for an international organization of sufficient authority to serve as an accountable trustee of world affairs.
George Gill described the League as an organization that "began its career during the 1920s as an organization committed to advancing both world peace and international cooperation." In the aftermath of World War I, led in part by American President Woodrow Wilson and the European nations victorious in World War I, the League emerged as an organ potentially capable of reducing geopolitical tensions and securing cooperative interaction between nation-states. Claude stated that the "development of both private and public schemes in the United States and Great Britain" drove the League forward.
The basic structure of the League included many of the economic, legal, social and humanitarian organs and agencies that would be restructured when the UN was developed û with an expanded membership in the later organization. A committee structure was employed by the League to manage these various activities, whereas in the UN a more comprehensive and extensive bureaucracy has developed over time as the U.N. has expanded its s...